Obama’s 0% Doctrine

From TomDispatch: The president breaks new ground when it comes to war with Iran.

By Tom Engelhardt | March 13, 2012

When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble — dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.”

Those ads came to mind recently when President Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were remarkably radical. Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked Americans — but just about nobody noticed.

I don’t mean, of course, that nobody noticed the president’s statements. Quite the contrary: they were headlined, chewed over in the press and by pundits. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich attacked them. Fox News highlighted their restraint. (“Obama calls for containing Iran, says ‘too much loose talk of war.’”) The Huffington Post highlighted the support for Israel they represented. (“Obama Defends Policies Toward Israel, Fends Off Partisan Critiques.”) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed back against them in a potentially deadly U.S.-Israeli dance that might bring new chaos to the Middle East. But somehow, amid all the headlines, commentary, and analysis, few seemed to notice just what had really changed in our world.

The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it. He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon — and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.

Consider the most startling of his statements: just before the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, the president gave a 45-minute Oval Office interview to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. A prominent pro-Israeli writer, Goldberg had produced an article in the September issue of that magazine headlined “The Point of No Return.” In it, based on interviews with “roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike,” he had given an Israeli air attack on Iran a 50% chance of happening by this July. From the recent interview, here are Obama’s key lines:

“I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff. I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”

Later, he added this chilling note: “I think it’s fair to say that the last three years, I’ve shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.”

The next day, in a speech meant to stop “loose talk about war” in front of a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying outfit, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the president offered an even stronger formula, worth quoting at length. Speaking of seeing the consequences of his decisions to use force “in the eyes of those I meet who’ve come back gravely wounded,” he said:

“And for this reason, as part of my solemn obligation to the American people, I will only use force when the time and circumstances demand it… We all prefer to resolve this issue diplomatically. Having said that, Iran’s leaders should have no doubt about the resolve of the United States — just as they should not doubt Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs. I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power… and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.

“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

An American president couldn’t come closer to saying that, should American intelligence conclude the Iranians were building a nuclear weapon, we would attack. The next day, again addressing an AIPAC audience, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the president’s commitment in stone: “No greater threat exists to Israel, to the entire region, and indeed to the United States, than a nuclear-armed Iran… Military action is the last alternative if all else fails, but make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act.”

The Power of Precedents

To understand what’s truly new here, it’s necessary to back up a few years. After all, precedent is a powerful thing and these statements do have a single precedent in the atomic age (though not one the president would profess to admire): the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. After all, one clearly stated reason for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program as well as one to produce biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In a series of speeches starting in August 2002, President George W. Bush publicly accused the Iraqi dictator of having an active nuclear program. His vice president hit the news and public affairs talk show circuit with a set of similar accusations, and his secretary of state spoke of the danger of mushroom clouds rising over American cities. (“We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon… [W]e don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”)

At the same time, the Bush administration made an effort — now long forgotten — to convince Congress that the United States was in actual danger of an Iraqi WMD attack, possibly from anthrax, in the immediate future. President Bush suggested publicly that, with unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), Saddam might have the ability to spray East Coast cities with chemical or biological weapons. And Congress was given fear-inducing classified private briefings on this.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, claimed that he voted for the administration’s resolution authorizing force in Iraq because “I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.”

Driving the need to produce evidence, however fantastic or fabricated, of a possible threat to the U.S. was a radical new twist on war-making 101. In the days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed that even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for “preventive” or “aggressive” war offered in the modern era.

Of course, the fact that Saddam’s Iraq had no nuclear program, no biological or chemical weapons, no functioning drones, and no way of reaching the East Coast of the United States proved strike three for critics of the Bush administration. Missed was what was truly new in the invasion: not just the 1% doctrine itself, but the idea — a first on planet Earth — of going to war over the possibility that another country might be in possession of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.

Until then, such a concept hadn’t been in the strategic vocabulary. Quite the opposite: in the Cold War years, nuclear weapons were thought of as “deterrence” or, in the case of the two massively nuclear-armed superpowers of that era, “mutually assured destruction” (with its fabulously grim acronym MAD). Those weapons, that is, were considered guarantors, however counterintuitively, against an outbreak of war. Their possession was a kind of grisly assurance that your opponent wouldn’t attack you, lest you both be destroyed.

In that spirit, between the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the Iraqi invasion of March 2003, seven countries — the Soviet Union, England, France, China, Israel (though its large nuclear arsenal remains unacknowledged), India, and Pakistan — all went nuclear without anybody suggesting that they be attacked simply for possessing such weapons. An eighth country — white-ruled South Africa — actually assembled six nuclear weapons, and later became the only country to de-nuclearize itself. South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil all had incipient nuclear programs, though none produced weapons. Japan is today considered to be at a point the Iranians have not yet reached: “breakout capacity,” or the ability to build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly if a decision to do so were made. In 2006, North Korea set off its first nuclear test and, within years, had become the ninth active nuclear power.

In other words, in 2003, the idea that the possession of nuclear weapons or simply of an “active” nuclear program that might one day produce such weapons was a casus belli represented something new. And when it became clear that Saddam had no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction at all, that explanation for American war-making, for what Jonathan Schell once dubbed “disarmament wars” — so visibly fraudulent — seemed to disappear into the dustbin of history.

War and the Presidential “I”

Until now, that is.

Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy President Obama has built on the Bush precedent. His represents, however, an even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine. In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States. We would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

And by the way, note that he didn’t say, “We don’t bluff.” His formulation was: “I don’t bluff.” And that “I” should not be ignored. The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a “unitary executive.” No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.

The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president’s private war. In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or “targeted killings” as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the “authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation.” In doing so, added Turley, “Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a ‘trust me’ pledge.” With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president’s private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment.

It is no longer a matter of “we,” but of a presidential “I” when it comes to unleashing attacks in what has become a global free fire zone for those drones and special ops forces. War, in other words, is increasingly lodged in the Oval Office and a commander-in-chief executive. As the Libyan intervention suggested, like the American people, Congress is, at best, an afterthought — even though this Congress would rubber-stamp a presidential act of war against Iran without a second thought.

The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a bomb — not yet at least. The “supreme leader” of their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons. If, however — and it’s a giant if — Iran actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club (with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.

What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine — and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the province and power of diplomacy.

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14 Responses to Obama’s 0% Doctrine

Tom’s piece is very well written. The quote from the grand ayatollah regarding possessing such weapons being a grave sin is especially valuable. However, I can look at other sites like the American Spectator and find writers who continue to offer up “statements” from the Iranians that say they intend to totally destroy Israel and on that basis they constitute a grave threat to both that country and indirectly to us.

So the problem confronting both “conservatives” which honestly I believe based on this year’s republican primaries are if we define conservative properly, are an endangered species, and the American public as a whole, is what to believe. The “alleged” quotes from the functional head of the government saying he considers these weapons immoral and won’t pursue them, or the other “alleged” quotes that make him look like a throwback to 1938 and Germany?

And this isn’t a trivial problem is it? As much as I like this website and respect the writers here, we need to be able to say with some clarity what really is going on. I personally need to be able to say to my friends who are looking at the other sites and think that the functional leader of Iran is pursuing 12th Iman dreams, that no, the translations are in error, he’s not THAT crazy, and be able to make a convincing case why.

“The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity.”

Well then. If he is not a weak, naïve ingenou ready to hand America and Israel over to the Mullahs, he is an extreme warmonger ready to plunge the US into ever expanding wars across the globe to stop Bhutan and Malta from access to nuclear weapons. Run to the hills, and let’s elect Romney, the stable peacenik.

Oy.

It is always fascinating when a website called “The American Conservative” that, from time to time, writes glowing paeans to Burke, forgets his singular, most valuable, contribution to political action: “context”.

One does not have to buy into the crazy right-wingers’ narrative, or accept the scenarios of doom and gloom woven by Bibi and the Likudniks, to acknolwedge that Iran is *different*. In goods ways and bad. Generally well-educated people; a large pro-Western segment of the population; no history of making war on its neighbours since at least 1821; etc. Those are the positives (in a strategic sense). But – it also has a history of global terrorism: Argentina, Germany, France. It also has a history of active meddling in the affairs of other countries – and getting *them* to go to war: the 1980 invasion of Iran by Iraq did not come out of the blue; Hamas and Hizbullah would not be bombarding Israel without Iranian support; Iran has been arming Syria; etc. It is not necessary to accept Bush/Frum’s idiotic “axis of evil” formulation to acknowledge fairly substantial, and scary, ties between North Korea, Pakistan and Iran in nuclear matters. We have no intelligence at all about Iran’s ties to the Central Asian nuclear dictatorships – enough to know they are friends and getting friendlier.

And, while Khatami and the Taliban had nothing in common, Ahmadinejad is a shi’ite Talib; in social policy terms, there is scant difference between him and the terrorist coddling Talibs who will soon be in power in Afghanistan.

As against this *context*, the President’s statement – not a doctrine of foreign policy, but a statement of policy in response to a unique set of circumstances – makes a lot more sense. It may not be the optimal policy, given the certainty that Iran will have a nuclear weapon in the medium term, and if one rejects the projection of US force at all except as against direct threats or attacks on US soil. But, given the nature and the source of the threat, the policy is not “extreme”.

I’m a native Persian-speaker and have been following the issue on Iranian conservative and government websites, as well as those of the opposition.

Khamenei, the “Leader of the Revolution”, is the chief of state and controls all levers of power. He is not a “grand ayatollah” and his religious credentials are questionable. More to the point, he has been implicated in systematic rape, torture and extra-judicial killings – for all of Islam’s violence, none of these are or were religiously sanctioned – not to mention widespread electoral fraud and financial corruption. For this reason, I would not rely on the “fatwa” as any sort of real expression of policy. Iran has been after a nuclear weapon since before the Revolution, and the experience of the Iraq war – and defeat – plus the treatment of North Korea, proved to the Iranian government that the only way to survive calls for “regime change” is to possess a nuclear weapon.

As for the Millennarians who are actually running the country right now – this is a tougher nut to crack. They are financially corrupt enough to convince me that they want to loot the country rather than destroy Israel – and get destroyed in the meantime. The various statements should be seen in context. Rafsanjani was making a comment about the strategic value of Israel’s nuclear weapons: you can take these as a threat, or take them as a realist’s assessment of the uselessness of nuclear deterrence in the absence of strategic depth. Ahmadinejad’s comments about “making Israel disappear from the map of the world” – which he repeats when he gets the chance – gets criticised in Iran, by conservatives even, for being unduly provacative. It is true that Iran’s policy is a referendum and a one-state solution, which will effectively lead to the disappearance of Israel. Whether they are genocidal – “who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? “

Sorry – just to add that Iran is not Germany in 1938, 42, 44 or even 45. Israel is not Poland; the US is not Britain or Vichy France; Putin is not Stalin; China is not China and Japan is not Japan. For any number of reasons, any historical comparison is inapt.

The authors of the US Constitution deliberately kept the power to declare war out of the hands of the executive because they knew from bitter experience how useful war is in robbing the people of their wealth and freedom by means of perpetual warfare (Orwell had something to say, as well, about the role of war in the perpetuation of tyranny). It is sad to realize that the American people and their elected representatives in Congress have acquiesced in the usurpation of Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

If this does not prove conclusively that neither the neocons in the Republican Party nor the Liberal interventionists in Democratic Party have any respect for the US Constitution and rule of law, then I don’t know what does.

Jeffrey Golberg has the cover story this week in Spectator (UK). “Israel Isn’t Bluffing”. Goldberg sees himself as a leading, if not the leading, expert on the subject of potential Israeli attack on Iran.

Two points. 1. “It is sad to realize that the American people and their elected representatives in Congress have acquiesced in the usurpation of Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.”

A constitution, even the US Constitution, is not an immutable document. “The American people and their elected representatives in Congress” do have wisdom that is not particularly worse than that of the framers. A constitution is there to protect, among other things, minorities from whims of passing majorities, but where generation after generation of people find a particular meaning to a particular set of words incapable of responding to concrete concerns, and “acquiesce” to its reintrepretation in application, then that is how the constitutional framework will function. I suspect the framers would have been horrified with the current application of the Second and Fourth Amendments; in the same way, the American people would be horrified to hear what the framers thought of as what *would* fit within the Eighth Amendment. The argument here not a mechanical application of the “Declaration of War” power of Congress, but a substantive one of oversight of Executive lawlessness. Which brings me to the second point.

2. “neither the neocons in the Republican Party nor the Liberal interventionists in Democratic Party have any respect for the US Constitution and rule of law”. There is a difference between the way each group approaches the issue of intervention, and that makes all the difference. Neocons speak the language of Empire and of Power; the entire orientation of the Republican war machine since the Red Scare has been the transformation of the Republic into a Presidential National Security State. The apogee came not under Bush – which had a pliant Congress funding his war aims – but Reagan, who had active treason being run out of his National Security Advisor’s offices in the Iran-Contra affair. Neocons deny that they are bound by any law or rule other than the Primacy of the US, in military terms, relative to any other state. Liberal interventionisms, even at their most hawkish, consider themselves bound by international law and the highest ideals on which the US was founded (“a decent respect to the opinion of mankind”). At some point, the means converge – and that is unfortunate. But to state baldly that liberalism, which is apt to choke itself with the law, and neocons demonstrate the same disfain for the rule of law, is to create a false equivalence.

I won’t even try sarcasm this time. The new “Obama Doctrine” (if one can dignify these fantastic assertions as a “doctrine”) pretty much puts an exclamation point on the reply to Franklin’s statement:

NO, we couldn’t, we have frittered it away.

We have a collection of spineless weasels in the congress, and a weak and egotistical cipher in the White House, who like all weaklings, likes nothing better than the chance to look strong and decisive, at a time when what the republic needs most is principled, intelligent leadership.

Regarding President Obama and his “beliefs” on the Constitution, here is an interesting quote from him:

“I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution…”
-Barack Obama

The question is: What does he respect about it? G.W. Bush at least asked for and received Congressional approval for the Iraq war. Obama just skipped that step all together when he ordered the U.S. military into the Libya conflict.

This sets a terrible precedent for whomever follows Obama. Executive power has been monotonically growing with each President that enters office regardless of their party affiliation.

The Iraqi Navy, off of the East coast of the USA, launching a WMD laden drone to spray coastal cities. . I had forgotten about that absurd picture painted by Bush/Cheney. The drones turned out to be made of balsa wood and powered by the equivalent of a small lawn mower engine, yet they were justification for going to war. We went temporarily insane after 9/11 (at least some of this country did) and actually believed these lies.

Goldberg is a disgusting Israeli hack. His certainity of Israel attacking Iran is mostly an attempt to goad us into doing it first and “doing it all the way”.

I don’t buy it. I don’t think Obama will do it. Besides, nothing short of an invasion will be successful and we know that is not going to happen.

The social climate in 2012 is not the same as 2002. The lying scum that are the neocons know that they won’t get away with it this time.

@ icarusr – I do not agree that there is any meaningful difference between the neocon and Liberal interventionist versions of imperialism. If the result is the same, what does it matter how cynical the neocon or sanctimonious the Liberal justifications are? The debacles in Korea and Vietnam were in no way better than the mess Reagan created in Central America or that Bush created in the Middle East. It will make absolutely no difference to me (or to the world, I suspect) whether Obama bombs Iran in 2012 or Romney does it in 2013. The same disaster would result.

As a strong backer of President Obama, I have supported him and trusted him over the past three difficult years. Now I am afraid he has painted himself into a corner. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that he sees this as his last chance to hold off Israel from starting a catastrophic war. If that’s the case, I hope he can pull it off.